How Obama Miscalculated on the Federal Healthcare Takeover

President Barack Obama continues to give lip service to his planned federal takeover of U.S. healthcare.  (Any pretext that this political football was about healing people vanished long ago. It's always been about the economy, stupid.)

But the president remains aloof and disconnected from the American people on this issue. According to the latest Rasmussen Reports Daily Tracking Poll, Pres. Obama now has a Presidential Approval Index rating of -17. Minus 17. That means that 25% of Americans (roughly the same number of people who identify themselves as hard-core liberals) strongly approve of the president's policies, while 42% (closing in on half of all Americans) strongly disapprove.

Although the president continues to make it clear that he would rather be a one-term president with accomplishments than a two-term ineffective president, that stubbornness does nothing to solve the healthcare problem, or anything else, for that matter. In point of fact, the only compromise to come out of this stance is that Mr. Obama is tracking to be a one-term ineffective president.

Did the president and the hard left in Congress miscalculate on healthcare? The answer is yes. Democrats are notoriously bad with numbers and healthcare is no exception. The president's healthcare death march had less to do with the drastically inflated number of uninsured people bandied about and more to do with the fact that healthcare amounts to 16% of the largest economy in the world. In healthcare he saw a chance to remake a big chunk of the economy in one shot.

Here are the real numbers that mattered in the healthcare debate. These are the numbers that the president and the left-leaning Congress forgot to take into account:

• The healthcare industry itself consists of nearly 350,000 locations.
• That industry employs 5.5 million people, all of whom would be affected by the president's plan and most of whom vote.
• There are a half million doctors and surgeons alone, not to mention over two million registered nurses.
• There are nearly 9,000 companies alone that make medical devices-nearly all of which would have been taxed to pay for the president's scheme.
• These 9,000 companies employ 360,000 people-again, all of whom would have been negatively affected and most of whom are voters.
• The president's plan as it stands finally ran off the rails in Massachusetts, with the special Senatorial election of Republican Scott Brown last week. The Bay State alone is home to more than 200 medical device companies. The president errs when he says the election didn't turn on healthcare. For these 200 companies and their employees, their friends and relatives, that's exactly what it turned on.

 According Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal, who assembled these numbers, The ObamaCare dreamers were driven by the chance to finally fulfill FDR's New Deal hope for universal healthcare. But what they ignored was the fact that  the world in general, and healthcare in particular, is immensely more complicated today than it was 70 years ago. Recasting one-sixth of a $14 trillion economy made up of 300 million people residing in 50 different states spread out over an area 16 times that of France was never going to happen.

The president continues his strategy of creating a bogey for each of his pet policies--someone or some group that must be defeated and whatever legislation the president proposes is the only way to do it. In the case of healthcare the bogey is the ephemeral "special interests" who want to preserve the status quo. Again, the president misrepresents the debate. Anyone with any understanding of our healthcare system knows that change is necessary and change must come.  But in clinging to an outmoded dream that is impossible to fulfill, the president has lost valuable time-much in the same way that Democrats cost the nation 17 years and counting  when they were rebuffed with HillaryCare.

It's not the Republicans or conservatives who are holding up healthcare. It's the leftists who cling to a dream that died with FDR in 1945, when we entered a post-war world and economy more complex than anyone could have dreamed.

It's time we looked at the numbers and came up with a healthcare system that's an actual improvement, rather than one that might be theoretically better if only this were 1939.

Just thought you might like to know.